1. 0 Strategic Information

Executive Summary

TPAC is looking forward to participating in stage 3 of APAC. We have included a range of new relationships at state, national and international levels. We will contribute to the APAC National Facility through providing support for our key clients (partners and wider research community) in the area of Earth Systems Science modeling. We expect that TPAC will contribute $684k to the National Facility over the five year period (and possibly slightly more). The focus for the grid program is on Earth Systems Science data repositories. We will continue the development of tools for knowledge discovery, visualization and analysis of the data in these repositories. Provision of these resources on the APAC grid will be through web services and OPeNDAP (under GT4). The key area of the education program is outreach in the form of workshops, pre-existing courses and email bulletins on TPAC and APAC activities. The total ETF of the entire TPAC program is 6.0EFT ($1050k per annum) of which APAC is requested to fund 3.0 EFTs ($525k per annum) and $160k over the five years for APAC grid related hardware. TPAC (and partners) will make very significant investments towards Grid infrastructure over the period of 3^rd stage of APAC (projected to total ~$500k) and on outreach activities (projected to total ~$100k).

1.0 Strategic Information

TPAC is a partnership of the following 6 organisations:

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  University of Tasmania (UTAS) and Australian Maritime College
  

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  Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (ACE CRC)
  
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  CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (CMAR)
  
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  Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre (BMRC)
  
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  Australia Antarctic Division (AAD)
  

The partnership is controlled by a collaborative agreement between all the partners, and currently runs until 31^st December 2006. The management of TPAC is by a management committee, the members of which report to their own organizations. The collaborative agreement is aligned with the current APAC agreement, and contains a complete schedule of the agreed contributions, projects and staff allocations. These schedules and contributions will be updated to conform with the new TPAC program described in this proposal.

Several new and proposed strategic relationships, at both the state and national level, in Earth Systems Science present the opportunity to effectively utilise the TPAC grid and advanced computing activities using the APAC grid and advanced computing infrastructure. These include relationships with the ARC funded ARCNESS research network, Australian Oceanographic Data Centre –Joint Facility (AODC-JF), Tasmanian companies such as Insight4, Sonardata and Hydro Tasmania, and the proposed ACCESS initiative for Earth Systems Science modeling. Additionally, TPAC has established and maintained significant international relationships (OPeNDAP, GFDL, AUKEGGS, and the NERC Data Grid). These relationships reflect the level of collaboration both within the partners and the wider Earth System Science community in Australia, and place TPAC in a strategic position to further build the links between Australian Researchers and the APAC advanced computing and grid infrastructure.

1.1 Strategic Plan

TPAC Mission Statement:

“Providing access to advanced computing, information infrastructure, and e-Research tools for Earth Systems Science researchers”
Strategically, TPAC will fulfil this mission statement by undertaking two distinct but complementary activities:

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  The provision of support for Earth Systems Science models, including activities to
  

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  Support for the proposed ACCESS ESS model on APAC computing and grid infrastructure
  
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  Support for AusCOM coupled Ocean/Sea-ice model on APAC and partner infrastructure
  
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  Support for intermediate complexity ESS models on the compute grid
  

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  The provision of Earth Systems Science Digital Repositories, including activities to
  

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  provide seamless discovery and access to a range of Earth System Science data
  
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  peer with other major international Earth System Science grids
  
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  implement best-practice information management for Earth System Science data
  

All of these activities will use the advanced computing and grid infrastructure provided by TPAC, APAC partners and the APAC National Facility and align with the APAC mission.

1.1.1 Advanced computing: Earth Systems Science Modelling

The Earth (or climate) System has an enormous impact on Australia, its inhabitants, their way of life and the economy. Figure 1 shows some of the key components of the Earth System. Future projections of the Earth System in response to changing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, atmospheric chemistry and aerosols show that we can expect significant changes in the climate of the Australian continent and in the global oceans.

New generation of Earth Systems models from Australian research organizations are being proposed as part of the Australian Community Climate Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) being lead by a joint venture of the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, but with the support of the universities, ACE CRC, TPAC and the Australian Greenhouse Office. Other potential stakeholders include Bureau of Rural Sciences, ANSTO, ABARE, QDNR, QDPIF and Geosciences Australia.



Figure 1: The Earth Systems and its components. Numerical models exist for all the listed components. The vision is to fully couple these models so that the bi-directional interactions between components can be simulated. Such simulations form the basis of climate change scenarios the Earth’s future climate.
The proposed ACCESS joint venture will develop state-of-the-art coupled Earth Systems Models using imported and Australian developed components. This joint venture is seen as an essential activity for the Australian Earth Systems Science community to remain internationally relevant and competitive and is required to cope with the growing number of model components (see Figure 2) that must interact with each other to produce more accurate scenarios of climate change and its impacts. For example, the next Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change simulations are likely to involve seven interactive model components of the Earth Systems (last column of Figure 2), in comparison, the current state-of-the-art Earth Systems model comprise just 3 model components.
An analysis of the proposed ACCESS stakeholder requirements has been undertaken through consultation with universities, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, and other parties to define the model requirements. One key requirement for non-CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology participants is the portability and implementation reliability of the ACCESS model and its components on the APAC National Facility and Partner Facilities. The requirements for a successful adoption of ACCESS by the wider ESS community extend beyond the execution environment on APAC affiliated facilities, and include significant resources for visualisation, analysis and digital repositories of input data and climate simulation results.



Figure 2: Earth Systems Models at the Hadley Centre, United Kingdom. Note the increasing sophistication of the model components and the increasing number of model components that are being included as part of the Earth Systems Models.

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